Logging results key to your poker biography

I don’t play with the consistency that I used to. I don’t depend on poker winnings to make for a better living.

If at the end of a session I have more than I started with, I’m happy with what I have and will head home with a smile on my face.

I found the black book at a World Market in 2003. It has a leather shell and is so thick, it resembles a Bible, although I’ve never found any sort of salvation inside.

That was the year I decided to get really, really serious about poker. It was my duty to keep track of all the wins and losses, and chart with accuracy my success with the game.

I was playing in weekly live tournaments and had accounts in all of the Internet poker rooms that have since been shut down by the federal government.

For a run of about 10 years, I was getting in at least 900-1,000 hands a week.

I never documented the hands on an individual basis. There are too many factors in poker that make that information useless. How you play a hand should vary with each opponent, and there is absolutely nothing that a person can do when bad short-term luck rears its ugly head.

The only thing that matters in poker is the bottom line. So with every tournament or cash-game session, I charted the date, how much time I spent in the game and the net amount of my playing bankroll.

It is commonly advised in poker circles to treat your bankroll as its own, independent entity. Keep the money separate from your traditional savings and day-to-day expenses.

Nobody does this.

But net results are net results, even if they don’t match up on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

If your documentation shows that you are a winning player over a period of time that exceeds 200 poker hours, congratulations. You are way ahead of the curve.

The next thing to examine with your profits is how much per hour you average. A common measure for limit Hold ’Em is 1.5 times the value of the big blind. So if you were in a $10/$20 game, $35 per hour would be an optimal result that would allow you to stay well ahead of the house rake.

No-limit games are harder to gauge, but if you were playing $1/$2 (typically the smallest game in a card room) and averaged profits of $10 per hour, you would be smashing the game.

Unfortunately, the documentation will also show that you are either a losing player or experiencing a very bad run.

That’s OK, too. By charting time with losses, it remains simple to average out the numbers.

You can rationalize losing poker. Dropping $100 isn’t any fun, but if you played four hours, it’s no different than spending that time on a golf course.

Longer-term or big-number losses are typically an indictment of a serious leak in your game that may or may not be fixable.

Computer programs also exist that do this documentation for you, but there is something about putting pen to paper that makes the experience more authentic and honest provided you stay true to the process.

Chuck Blount is an award-winning journalist with over 15 years in the field. His weekly poker column is internationally syndicated and has appeared weekly since 2005. In addition to writing duties, he is also an assistant sports editor.

Prior to the Express-News, he was a sportswriter for the Idaho Falls Post-Register, covering Idaho State athletics and high schools. He is a 1998 University of Iowa graduate.